Mike Murphy's public service message about the arts

IT’S RARE WE get an RTÉ presenter having a public go at the broadcaster.

It’s not often we get that from anyone connected with RTÉ, because programme-makers and presenters tend to be a little paranoid about the not unimportant matter of their careers.

In private, though, it’s different. Many of them are disgruntled and bitter, jealous and precious. Working in an ego-driven, bureaucratic, unionised, political, creative-heavy semi-State that’s in a financial and programming crisis of unprecedented proportions will do that to a person. Then again, it’s showbusiness. They’d probably be like that anyway.

That tradition of public self-censorship is a reason why Mike Murphy’s letter to The Irish Times this week, complaining of the scheduling of his programme Masterpiece: Ireland’s Favourite Painting, was so entertaining.

“The transmission time, 10.15 at night, was also an issue for me,” he wrote. “Here we have the Cromwellian edict of arts programming being banished into the Connacht of broadcasting, ie, at, or past, most people’s bedtime. Look at The Works. I never have, not because it’s not a fine programme (I believe it is just that) but because it’s on too late. On the night Masterpiece was transmitted it was preceded at peak time (9.30) by the most excruciating boring Prime Time on record – two semi-coherent wannabe front-benchers shouting at each other about the water charges, and a thrilling dead-handed exposition on internet copyright piracy. There, I thought, is where the Cromwellian edict should be enforced.”

If not quite explosive, in RTÉ terms it had genuine spark. It also had the byproduct of creating some previously absent chatter about the programme, so in that respect everyone was a winner.

But let’s try not to be cynical for once. Apparently, Murphy was heavily involved in the making of his programme, visiting as many of the long-listed artworks as possible. That might sound routine, but radio and TV researchers regularly read the books on behalf of the interviewers, and on other programmes a presenter’s only involvement might be as a walking, talking, cheque-accepting frontman for the programme after the real work has been done by an unheralded team.

Murphy’s ire may, in part, have been stoked by the changing of an original plan to have the Masterpiece segments shown in a Friday-evening slot for The Works – closer to the Nationwide slot Murphy pined for in his letter.

That proposed scheduling of The Works was dropped in favour of the late-night slot to which The View was previously consigned. Then the Works was pushed farther back again by the modern-day Murder She Wrote that is The Mentalist.

The scheduling of arts programmes tends to attract complaints in part because of their centrality to RTÉ’s public-service remit, but also because their advocates tend to be articulate and have access to the media. Still, the programmes have suffered through the years from poor handling. Last year Noel Curran, RTÉ’s then-new director general, promised that arts and culture were priorities. But when the moribund The View was replaced by The Works, with the same producer and presenter, in the same time slot, it smacked of being a fix that suited RTÉ more than it did the viewer.

Although hagiographic on the whole, in biographies of Graham Linehan and John Banville the Arts Lives strand was sometimes expert and illuminating. Further profiles are on the way, but as this year’s showpiece arts show, Masterpiece has so far brought only one original documentary while feeding segments into The Works and Pat Kenny’s radio show, alongside a complementary website. In television terms, it has done little to dampen the sense that some in RTÉ see arts as a duty rather than an opportunity.

Still, arts programmes shouldn’t be there for their own sake. The View too often reinforced chin-stroking, artspeak stereotypes. Other Voices veers between brilliance and self-satisfaction. And RTÉ’s arts output has largely lacked critical bite. But where Murphy was perhaps sharpest was in his observation about Prime Time, because it’s not simply that arts don’t get a look in, it’s that current affairs have blocked RTÉ1’s schedule. During many weeks of the year, midweek prime-time slots are dominated by talk: The Frontline, Prime Time and The Late Late Show.

As current-affairs programming has been edged out of British schedules, RTÉ deserves credit for keeping faith. There are various reasons: it attracts ratings, it’s cheaper, it is a public service, it brings in a cavalcade of personalities and it delivers the thrill of confrontation. It can be vital viewing, but it is also often radio on TV, so much so that the discussions are often just later rounds of the same tedious bout.

It is not so much that arts programmes are pushed to the margins as that RTÉ1’s schedules too often lack variety that the arts, and other genres, would bring. Although Two Semicoherent Wannabe Frontbenchers Shouting at Each Other About . . . would make an excellent title for any programme.

shegarty@irishtimes.com

@shanehegarty